


The Woman Behind The Mask: An Exclusive

by IShipItAllAndThenSome



Series: Daxamite Princess Lena AU [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Cat Grant Is Awesome, Cat Grant Knows Kara Danvers Is Supergirl, F/F, Gen, Journalism, Lena Luthor Needs a Hug, Lena Luthor-centric, Reporter Cat Grant, also basically a love letter to Lena Luthor, basically a recap of Under The Same Sun, but that's par for the course for my writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 23:16:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13258665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IShipItAllAndThenSome/pseuds/IShipItAllAndThenSome
Summary: Cat Grant, CEO of CatCo and hero in her own right, sits down with Lena Luthor to discuss invasions, infrastructure recovery, and rumors in an exclusive interview.





	The Woman Behind The Mask: An Exclusive

**Author's Note:**

> This is formatted like an interview article in a magazine. Weird? Probably. How I had to write it? Definitely.

She carries herself like royalty. That is the first thing you notice about Lena Luthor, the first thing I noticed when I met her so many years ago. Even as a teenager, she had no awkward moments, no clumsiness, no inconvenient phases; her every word and movement was carefully calculated.

When I mention this to her, she immediately softens her posture, leaning her elbows on her kitchen island. “Thank you,” she says, voice quiet. 

Most people would take that as a compliment. Puff out their chest, toss their head back—pose. Lean in. 

Lena does precisely the contrary. But then, if you’d been royalty under the worst conceivable circumstances, you’d shirk the label, too.

Despite what some might consider a rocky start, she is a gracious hostess, and she makes a mean martini. She offers me one with a sly smile, excusing it with, “A little birdie told me you were an aficionado.”

She makes one for herself, but doesn’t drink it, merely twirling a toothpick lousy with olives around the rim of the glass. “I have to refamiliarize myself with alcohol actually _working_ ,” she says.

I imagine she’s refamiliarizing herself with quite a few things these days. 

You wouldn’t know it looking at her, but she’s adapted to a cornucopia of complications in her twenty four years on this Earth. From the day she was born, removed from some artificial womb I won’t begin to describe here in a since-gentrified neighborhood in Metropolis, she’s adapted to death and loss and madness with more grace than most of us could manage. The latest of her myriad hurdles to vault over is one of blood and birthright—nature versus nurture.

One month ago, she was approached by a scientist from beyond our stars who promised her a chance to save the world. This scientist offered her technology that could have ended famine, drought, fossil fuel dependence, greenhouse gas emissions, and any other modern plight that comes to mind. Only a fool or a monster would have turned her down. 

“When Rhea first pitched her transmatter portal to me, all I could think was… I can fix it.”

When I ask what, she shakes her head. 

“Everything.” She laughs, closing her teeth around one olive and drawing the toothpick back. “I have always posited that the point of accruing anything—strength, knowledge, wealth—is to use it to fix the world’s problems. Learning for learning’s sake is _incredible,_ but what’s even better is applying what you’ve learned to real world issues. Becoming fluent in a language means you can communicate with more people; understanding physics means you can build more efficient transportation, safer, cheaper housing. No one can reasonably spend millions of dollars on themselves, but there are millions of charities that could put that money to good use, and why bother being strong if…” 

She cuts herself off and, after a moment’s hesitation, takes a drink. 

There’s the rub. 

When Rhea, Queen of Daxam, first introduced herself to Lena Luthor, it was through layers and layers of deception. She didn’t tell Lena who she was, where she was from, or why she was really here. 

Lena sensed her dishonesty and called her out on it, and when Rhea admitted that she was an alien, thought that was the end of it. They built the portal, and during the first tests, Rhea summoned an invading force to conquer our world.

The kind of leader she is becomes clear when we find out how she managed that. When Lena tried to stop her, aided by Supergirl, Rhea shorted out her central nervous system to ensure that her plan would continue uninterrupted. 

“She was—” Lena cuts herself off, running her fingers through her hair and shaking her head. “She was thorough. Had the whole conquest in the works since ’79. If one thing had been different, it would have gone off without a hitch.”

“What one thing is that?”

She glances up at me, inscrutable, and crooks one finger. I play along, leaning in to hear her answer, and actually laugh when she gives it.

“Mommy issues.”

Lena seems surprised that I find her response entertaining, and it takes her a moment to start laughing, too. As she does, I can almost see a weight lifting off her shaking shoulders.

“See, she… She picked my father because he was wealthy and influential and intelligent. He was the closest to an equal she could fathom. And she picked my mother—” 

Here, she stops to explain herself; having had three mothers in her short life, it’s an unfortunate necessity, and the one currently relevant was an engineering PhD candidate whose work caught the eye of Luthor Corp’s R&D department. She died when Lena was four—all a part of Rhea’s plan. 

“Anyway, she picked my mother because she was close to Lionel.”

_Close._

Lena’s cheeks color. “They were involved. That was the cover she set up for me, to establish me as a _human_ bastard so I could… you know.”

Don’t we all?

“But what she didn’t count on was Lillian Luthor’s unadulterated loathing.” She shrugs, light catching on the faint bands of hypertrophic scar tissue that have wrapped around her arms since her return from a month-long disappearance. “I couldn’t have asked for a more privileged upbringing, I really couldn’t have, and I’m grateful that I didn’t go into foster care after my mother died. But Lillian never wanted me, and she wasn’t afraid to say so to my face.”

Here, she begins to pick up speed, like she’s told this story before and wants to circumvent an uncomfortable tangent. I sit back and let her talk. 

“It was fine, honestly, it was, and she’s not even the worst mother I’ve had. But when you grow up feeling… like a transplant organ attacked by antibodies, you get used to pulling away. And when the metaphoric organism rejecting you is one of the biggest names in bigotry, doing the right thing is rebellion, and you get used to needing to overcompensate.”

In the past year alone, anyone with Google and two brain cells to rub together could find at least three examples of that urge to correct. Renaming and redirecting the family company, testifying against Lillian and Lex Luthor, becoming a superhero, ending an invasion—these are just the top of the heap. 

“So when I realized that the only way to stop the invasion was to release lead into the atmosphere, making it toxic to any Daxamite on the ground, I leapt at the opportunity.”

“But you were a Daxamite.”

“I had the DNA,” she says—a well-worn phrase, by the sound of it. “I was born on Earth. I grew up here. I didn’t even know I was anything but human until last fall.”

“So, in order to save the Earth, you were willing to die?”

Very much alive, she gives me a wry smile. “If that was the choice I was faced with, die for my home or live with the guilt of killing everyone I’d ever met… It was as easy as falling in love.”

I could take this as an in to ask about her love life—there are cellphone pictures of our local heroines looking quite cozy—but now is not the time. 

“Didn’t come down to that, though,” she says with an air of finality. “Rhea needed me to blend in on this planet, so she implanted a device that shut down gene expression. Until it was triggered, I didn’t have any powers. I was physiologically no different than any human, and when push came to shove, I would rather not have my powers than not have a home.”

For an engineer, she’s quite the poet. 

“So,” I begin, “you singlehandedly—”

She has the audacity to laugh. “God, no! I—yeah, I jerry-rigged the atmospheric dispersal that scared them all off, but I did it with help. Supergirl shut off the dampener so I wouldn’t die, and activated the dispersal. Lillian helped, to be frank, and there were dozens more people who played massive roles in saving the world.”

Don’t bother trying to find them; she won’t name anyone who doesn’t have a pseudonym. 

“Even my brothers had a hand in it. Lex built the dispersal to poison Kryptonians.”

“Brothers, plural?”

“I know! Is it too much to ask for a sister?” 

The joke doesn’t quite reach her eyes. 

“Rhea had a son,” she admits. “Older than me, old enough to have fled his home when it was dying. If he hadn’t run away then, I would never have been born. And if he hadn’t done it again on Earth, who knows where the troops would have gone?”

To hear her tell it, even a man in jail and a coward allergic to responsibility _and_ lead played bigger roles than her in saving the planet. 

Across the room, two batons are crossed on the wall like display swords. Anyone who’s seen the news in the past six months would recognize them. 

Lena catches me looking. “Go ahead.”

I know what she thinks I’m planning to ask her—will she ever don her purple armor and become National City’s hero once more? What is to become of Galaxy Girl?

I also know that, whether or not she suits up again, whether or not she reactivates her powers, Lena Luthor is, and always will be, a hero, so I ask a different question. Recently, she was spotted near a bridal salon with a small group of women.

“When are you and Supergirl tying the knot?”

She cackles, shocked, and for the first time, she looks twenty four. 

“I’m not getting married,” she giggles. “My friend is engaged.”

“Your… _friend?”_

She mimes zipping her lips, then gets up, padding over to the wall in bare feet. She has to stretch up onto her toes to pull the batons down, but she manages, crossing back towards the kitchen and presenting them to me. “Give it a shot.”

Just how her batons change shape is top secret, but she demonstrates. The metal in her hand morphs slowly, like she can’t quite pick a form for it to take, but after a moment, a tiny facsimile of our little birdie stands in her palm.

Lena smiles, leaning her hip against the counter. “Still got it.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed it! It was fun to write, and a nice way to wrap things up. There will probably be some more stuff to fill the space between the end of S2 and the start of S3, but it'll all be in chronological order, so don't worry about that! No guarantee on regular updates for the between times, though.  
> Feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what you thought! This was going to go up on New Years' Day, but I was on a bus, and then freezing half to death at a shuttle stop for three hours, then crashing at a friend's house so I didn't get the other half and too anxious to ask about Wi-Fi, and then I just loafed around my dorm yesterday, recovering from all the nonsense. But I'm good, now! And I've had this floating around for weeks! And now it's yours!


End file.
